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The Bard

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Everything posted by The Bard

  1. General Book Thread

    The first time I read Lost I looked into the allusions but now I tend to glaze over them to get back to the imagery which clicks with me more immediately in this than in pretty much all other epics. I don't really have the patience for proper close reading these days. Aye on the Eliot, Prufrock is one of my all time faves, and Wasteland makes me want to kill myself. It's not even the language that's tough to grasp, it's that he references all these events and cultural artefacts in the most arcane way possible, and attempting to be a conscientious lit grad was the only thing that pulled me through it. It's almost how Continental Philosophy is, full of these abstruse shibboleths only put there to disguise the fact that nothing is actually being talked about or examined.
  2. General Book Thread

    If it was open that's an example of me just not fully getting Milton's verbiage. The exact lines are: "One gate there only was... Due entrance he disdained, and in contempt, At one slight bound high overleaped." Satan's so metal. Paradise Lost needs to be turned into a black metal album vocalised by Christopher Lee. Edit: That's a pretty good example, and obviously it's Milton so there are obviously going to be examples of amazing verse in every context, I was just saying that the genuinely stunning passages occur more in the dark, fiery and baleful places. The rhythm of the meter in the first and second book just tends to be so much more imperial and full of syllabic stress in quick sequence, which I personally prefer to the mellifluous flow of the passage you quoted above.
  3. PlayStation 4 Console Discussion

    I really enjoyed the shit out of Wolfenstein, it has, embarrassingly, the best (or least shitty) story of any triple-a game in 2014.
  4. General Book Thread

    Reading Book IV of Paradise Lost again, just gotten to the part where Satan's having an emo tantrum and trying to decide whether he should just squash the beef with god, but eventually is like "that shit be unseemly yo, time to go fuck up Adam and the rib lady." Definitely getting the vibe that Milton wasn't so much into the whole eden/god/Jesus thing because the descriptions of verdure and sumptuous landscapes just comes off as limp compared to the absolutely explosive and evocative descriptions of Hell and Satan. I mean, compare probably the best lines written in the English language: "Him the almighty power Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms" with "Insuperable height of loftiest shade, Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvian scene, and as the ranks ascend, Shade above shade, a woody theater Of stateliest view." A bit perfunctory. Not really feeling it are you Milton?
  5. good stuff thread.

    I'm going to listen to the Steven Wilson record that just came in the post and take a nap on my couch. The idea of doing this is sexually arousing to me right now.
  6. inFamous: Second Son / First Light

    Riffing off the above, since I'm playing Metro 2033 again, the detail and atmosphere of the world is completely ruined by the awful NPC animations. It makes it a thousand times more jarring to look at a poorly animated character when she exists in a beautifully created world.
  7. Watch Dogs

    Thinking back on it AC4 was such an amazing game. Absolutely gorgeous too.
  8. PC Gaming Discussion

    Well the good news is that it's a whole lot of fun.
  9. Now you've got a chance to get into her. Hey oh!
  10. PlayStation 4 Console Discussion

    Yeah, it just seems like PS4 is still a better option for me right now for social gaming than PC. Since most of my friends started working, our ventrilo channel is pretty much deserted and there's none of that good old student loan cash to spend on component upgrades . So there's no really worthwhile online experience yet huh? Might just wait until destiny then I guess.
  11. PlayStation 4 Console Discussion

    I'm thinking about getting a PS4 this weekend. What multiplayer games do you guys tend to hit up on a regular basis? @Daft, Watch Dogs is really crap. Could go on, but I feel like it doesn't deserve my words.
  12. General Book Thread

    Just finished reading This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald's first novel and it's crazy how much of a contrast it is to his later work. The authorial voice is so much stronger, and the ideas aren't as implicit, but he flat out uses the protagonists as tools for direct commentary on pretty much everything he wants to talk about. Which was great, it gave it a sort of oratory and rhetorical feel in parts whereas I didn't feel that for example, Gatsby, or Tender is the Night had that about them. Also started reading an anthology of Lovecraft stories. Got through Mountains of Madness and Call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu was great, short, engaging investigative horror fiction. I didn't expect the beauty of expression that it has in parts. Mountains of Madness is probably the most frustrating thing I've ever read in my life though. Full to the brim with unnecessary background technical information about Pleistocene rock formations, geology, evolutionary biology etc. There one section that's literally an exposition about how drill bits work. It took some patience to get through, because instead of being explanatory either contextually or explicitly, it just threw out these terms and expected you to have an encyclopaedia at hand. I suspect it was there more to make the reader think "gee isn't he a clever fucker," than anything else. Except in reality she's thinking "why do I need to know about drill bits in a story about tentacled space monsters?" Either way, the ideas are incredible. The horror doesn't come from the unknown, but from the unknowable; the idea that there are things lurking in the universe that our senses can't...well, make sense of, or understand, whether that's because they're dimensionally composed in a way that's alien to us, or have an evolutionary history that's completely separate from our own. Need to read more, but I'm going to have to be wise about what I select since Cthulhu was great, but Mountains of Madness was only tolerable for the last third (which is where it got pretty good).
  13. They're all variations on competitive gaping. Except for the Lebanese midgets, obviously.
  14. Forum User Photos

    Fuck that, the lean look suits you. I've let gym work slide for so long that I don't even know where to start anymore.
  15. Zechs read about enumerative induction in a logic 101 textbook and spends his days tragically applying it to all aspects of human existence.
  16. The Witness

    Oh yeah, that has a similar vibe, seems like a crazy ambitious project as well. A team of four extrapolating entire ecosystems from a series of algorithms? Seems like something an evolutionary biologist would be into rather than a videogame developer.
  17. The Witness

    This is probably like the best looking game on next gen consoles.
  18. Watch Dogs

    This game is just so joyless, charmless and humourless. I feel like I've been staring into space after playing it for any length of time. There isn't a single character that I don't hugely despise.
  19. Google's Self-Drive Cars

    The problem is that when a machine's vehicle, indication or sign recognition software (as well as everything else in the car that's digitised) malfunctions, nobody is going to know unless there are detectors in place for every possible contingency. A slight error in a high risk situation will be enough to cause a major disaster. In contrast, when a human has dementia, it's both obvious to the person in question, and everyone she interacts with. So until Google programs an all encompassing artificial intelligence that has tendrils in every aspect of the hardware it's operating, I don't think I'd trust this thing to perform all the functions a human being can perform so intuitively.
  20. Watch Dogs

    I've played it for a good ten hours and I can't figure out why it's an open world game.
  21. bad stuff thread.

    You'll be fine in the moment, it's the anxiety leading up to the deed that's the killer. Maybe take some inderol. You've got some serious stones doing an hour lecture though, I had one ungraded ten minute presentation to give this year for my Masters and I fucked off abroad .
  22. Watch Dogs

    Spoiler: Black Flag is a much, much better game.
  23. Watch Dogs

    Apart from the specious problems people have brought up about dynamic lighting and other marginal shit, how are people finding the experience of playing the game?
  24. PlayStation 4 Console Discussion

    Dude, fuck that, get the drum kit let's start an N-E post rock, shoegaze band.
  25. Watch Dogs

    Bought this off cdkeys.com for £25.99 last night and it's installing now. Soups excited.
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